This paper (13 page PDF) describes a project where students created posters describing their research and displayed them in an open format on campus. The 'research' studies people who attended the poster session; there was a pre-test and post-test to evaluate 'learning' along with a survey where the participants were asked to rate their enjoyment. I find the concept intriguing. Wouldn't it be interesting is professors and graduate students did open poster sessions for the general public at a local mall? The purpose of such a session would of course go far beyond narrowly-defined 'learning' and even 'enjoyment'. Of course, the real question here is (as even this study acknowledges) the "intrinsic motivation" of the people presenting the posters. In this example the students were given extra credit, an incentive that doesn't apply to professors. Image: UVic, where "a student-oriented and student-run annual event" open to the public allows students to showcase their reserach.

As usual I don't think much of the actual research (the data set consist of psychology students at a midwestern university, and the result evaluated is effect on GPA). But the concept of the 'working alliance' is intriguing. "In his 1979 paper, Bordin argued that a working alliance occurs when one person makes an effort to change and another person serves as a facilitator of that change." The purpose of the current paper (18 page PDF) is to "was to develop a theoretically grounded and psychometrically sound instrument for measuring students’ perceptions of the working alliance they experience with their teacher." They worked their way from 93 content-valid measures drawn from the literature to a set of 18 statistically relevant items divided into three major categories: collaborative bond, teacher competence, and student investment. See also Rogers's 2009 paper 'The Working Alliance in Teaching and Learning: Theoretical Clarity and Research Implications'.

The term 'Autonomous and Intelligent Systems' (A/IS) stands for what we would commonly call AI and this is an extensive effort to describes the ethics of A/IS system design. This document (266 page PDF) will take some time to read. Take the time. I applaud the good intentions of the IEEE here but just as you wouldn't want a philosopher to design a bridge, a document that reads to me a bit like "Ethics by Engineers" feels wrong. For example, consider one of the "goals" of the document: "Prioritize metrics of well-being in their design and use." It's a basic error to substitute 'metrics' for outcomes, but they make it here. The "concerns" include automated weapons, safety, affective computing and mixed reality. OK. But where are the concerns about stereotyping and misrepresentation, which are the actual problems today? But beyond any such mundane concerns is "the seminal question of determining the key performance indicators (KPIs) of their success once introduced into society." Sigh. The IEEE website will make you fill in a form to access this document, so I uploaded a copy to my own site so you can access it directly. For more ethics as designed by engineers, see the IEEE Ethics in Action website.

This short paper (8 page PDF) is a "call to action for policy makers to mandate that publicly funded educational resources are released under open licence to ensure that they reside in the public." Interestingly the document cautions that "the 'open' in MOOCs is very different from the 'open' in OER," though this is the opposite of our intent back in 2008 when we first created them. The writers also assert (correctly) that "It is anomalous that while publicly funded research is mandatorily open there is no similar encouragement for learning resources to be openly available."

Forbes is reporting Alison's oft-debunked claim to have created the world's first MOOCs. It's hard to read this article as anything other than an advertorial (again, I caution people against trusting the traditional media where commercial interests are concerned). I have written to Allison in the past about this but there appears to be no legislation or constraint requiring that they represent themselves honestly. As for the question in the headline, the answer is "no" - free and open online self-study courses have been around since the 1990s (my own on logical fallacies course was published in 1995) and if they were the answer to to the world's education needs they would have solved the problem sometime in the last 22 years. Ditto the self-serve certificate you have to pay them for.

In the ongoing discussion on OER repositories David Wiley suggested today that "While many people are aware of the 5Rs framework for thinking about the legal openness of OER, but far fewer people are aware of the ALMS framework for thinking about the technical openness of OER." It was introduced in 2010 in Open Learning, a Taylor & Francis journal that throws up a subscription barrier if I want to read it. But there are open access copies here and here. The acronym stands for "Access to editing tools, Level of expertise required to revise or remix, Meaningfully editable and Source-file access." The authors write, "technical aspects of OER will affect how ―open‖ they really are. Creators of OER who wish to promote revising and remixing should ensure that OER are designed in such a way that users will have access to editing tools, that the tools needed to will not require a prohibitive level of expertise, and that the OER are meaningfully editable and self-sourced."

I mentioned in a tweet the other dat that David O. White is new to me. But he's not in fact new; he is the same David White who introduced us to the 'visitors and residents' terminology back in 2011. This explains his placement on a panel with Marc Prensky. I've added his feed to my aggregator but since he posts infrequently don't expect to see a lot (his post prior to this one dates from September). Anyhow, this article will give you a sense of his current thinking. "It’s of great interest to me how an institution approaches the networked environments and practices. Most institutions now understand there is value in the network but often kill that value in the process of institutionalising it." he writes."Our challenge is in creating institutional structures (hierarchy) which can encourage and support those approaches while holding them in an open hand."

I've been on Mastodon for just over a year; my first post was last December 3. Since then I've written small stories, discussed theory, documented 1500 km of bike rides, and engaged in general banter. What I like about it is that it is a small and informal community I can share with. Some people call it a pedagogy of small. Others call it a pedagogy of slow. If it's a pedagogy at all, it's a pedagogy of harmony (which really, at long last, may be my answer to Friere). Tanya Dorey writes, "With that first step, we are again at an interesting starting point. Where do we go from here?" This article is a collection of thoughts from her and four others who share the same social space I share on this harmonious platform. P.S. be sure to explore trubox.ca as another interesting alternative form of pedagogical community.

I don't know how much damage the end of net neutrality in the United States would cause, but over the long run, it's probably significant. This is in large part because it is based on a flawed understanding of internet technology. In this email Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, and other internet pioneers release a short letter linking to their earlier submission to the FCC (53 page PDF) in opposition to the ending of net neutrality. Beyond the obvious policy intent, this document is a great short-form introduction to the basics of internet technology, describing the principles on which it was founded, and the changes over the last 15 years. It also provides a significant number of concrete examples of cases where users were harmed in the absence of clearly defined rules.

One of the more salient stories this year has revolved around the phenomenon of fake news and (via fake news) managing and massaging public perceptions. The gist of this article is that, while social media manipulation is a problem that cannot be taken lightly, it would be misleading to attribute the U.S. election results (and the Brexit vote, etc.) to social media. Instead, write the authors of this report, we should look at mainstream media. For example, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." I find it interesting that it is this same media that is now affixing responsibility for the outccome on social media, when the scale of the coverage in traditional media dwarfs that found through alternativer sources. And finally, I attribute the election results to the voters (and I use the word 'attribute' rather than 'blame' when putting on my scientific or journalistic hat).

I don't think this paper really succeeded in its stated objective of defining massive open online courses. What we do get is a sense that there are many interpretations of the form, and that if you sample mostly the xMOOC form, you'll find that xMOOC properties (like instructor-centeredness) predominate. It's interesting for me to observe that as the research moves from primary sources and into secondary sources (and tertiary sources, and more) that the researchers' understanding changes. Now instead of having direct experience they are reporting on what the research says, and with no real constraints on what can be said in research, assertions are replicated and become fact.

The authors writem, "The three main themes that emerged from this study were: the importance of online communication approaches, challenges and supports for online collaborative learning, and that care is at the core of online learner support" (note that the abstract expresses this quite differently). I include this paper here not so much to address these issues (though I certianly have my own opinions) but to ask readers to think about the methodology. The study is based on interviews with four higher edeucation instructors. The authors assert "it was conducted through a post-Positivist paradigm and the findings are not intended to generalize," which is good. But why is this presented as 'research' rather than, say, 'argument' or 'perspectives'? The reserachers knew what they were looking for at the start; "the interviews focused on care expressions in digital delivery settings made within each instructor case." I think there are arguments to be made for the three themes, and they are cogently assembled here, but it just seems misleading to represent them here as discovered through reserach. Read more articles from the special issue on the AERA Online Teaching and Learning SIG.

"I want to establish an on-line repository with OERs of primary and secondary education," wrote Panagiotis Stasinakis on a Creative Commons discussion list. "I am searching for a platform, an open-source platform, to install it in my private server and use it for the repository." The result was an interesting compendium of resouces, including: